scholarly journals Reducing Dependence on Digital Biodiversity Data Silos Through Global Alignment and Collaboration

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Nelson ◽  
Talia Karim ◽  
Rosemary Gillespie ◽  
Jose Fortes ◽  
Douglas Jones
Keyword(s):  
Community Engagement ◽  
Data Aggregation ◽  
Working Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Alignment ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Funding Model ◽  
The Impact

Over the last decade, the Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) organization and the Advancing the Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) grant program, both funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), have made large strides in the aggregation of pre-existing siloed digital collections data as well as the new digitization of previously dark collections data across the United States. The impact of iDigBio leadership in community engagement (e.g., through discipline-specific workshops and webinars) and data mobilization (e.g., aggregation assistance, portal development) is widespread and with impact across all collection types and sizes. Moreover, the funding model for the ADBC program, which required the development of digitization-based Thematic Collection Networks (TCNs), facilitated engagement and community building across collections, which previously often worked independently from one another or with a smaller group of institutions and/or collaborators. The attempt to create ever-growing biodiversity data aggregators to improve global research access to digital biodiversity data has made huge progress over the past decade and has resulted in increased availability of biodiversity data from fewer, larger data stores. It has also motivated unselfish collaboration between major aggregators in search of strategies for merging these data silos into a consolidated global data product. We describe an ongoing collaboration between the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) to establish a global framework for integrating technologies, processes, standards, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), ingestion, data, and data services, with the goal of building a well-documented linked system that relies on the various areas of expertise of the initial partners but with definitive pathways for incorporating new and existing entities as they desire or are developed. We use the case of paleontological data as an exemplar of the potential impact of this collaboration. The iDigBio Paleontology Digitization Working Group, which was originally created by iDigBio as part of their community engagement program, has continued to be an active and engaged community of data providers and end-users, organizing numerous workshops and webinars. Currently, working group members, in collaboration with iDigBio staff and developers, are examining issues specific to paleontologic data aggregation that were identified by data providers; they are also working on a series of best-practices guidelines for sharing paleontologic data that will ideally help to reduce the number of mistakes made by downstream data aggregation manipulations. The focus of the working group is, and has been, largely community driven and supported by iDigBio through the provision of virtual meeting space for participants and by hosting the group's wiki-page of resources. Additionally, iDigBio has been proactive in working with other digitization initiatives in the paleontologic community (e.g., Paleobiology Database) on projects such as ePANDDA (enhancing Paleontological and Neontological Data Discovery API), which seeks to link existing digital resources through API development.

scholarly journals DiSSCo, iDigBio and the Future of Global Collaboration

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Nelson ◽  
Deborah L Paul
Keyword(s):  
Working Group ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
The United States ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Data Generation ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Data Accessibility ◽  
The Us ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) is the United States’ (US) national resource and coordinating center for biodiversity specimen digitization and mobilization. It was established in 2011 through the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, an initiative that grew from a working group of museum-based and other biocollections professionals working in concert with NSF to make collections' specimen data accessible for science, education, and public consumption. The working group, Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA), released two reports (Beach et al. 2010, American Institute of Biological Sciences 2013) that provided the foundation for iDigBio and ADBC. iDigBio is restricted in focus to the ingestion of data generated by public, non-federal museum and academic collections. Its focus is on specimen-based (as opposed to observational) occurrence records. iDigBio currently serves about 118 million transcribed specimen-based records and 29 million specimen-based media records from approximately 1600 datasets. These digital objects have been contributed by about 700 collections representing nearly 400 institutions and is the most comprehensive biodiversity data aggregator in the US. Currently, iDigBio, DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections), GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) are collaborating on a global framework to harmonize technologies towards standardizing and synchronizing ingestion strategies, data models and standards, cyberinfrastructure, APIs (application programming interface), specimen record identifiers, etc. in service to a developing consolidated global data product that can provide a common source for the world’s digital biodiversity data. The collaboration strives to harness and combine the unique strengths of its partners in ways that ensure the individual needs of each partner’s constituencies are met, design pathways for accommodating existing and emerging aggregators, simultaneously strengthen and enhance access to the world’s biodiversity data, and underscore the scope and importance of worldwide biodiversity informatics activities. Collaborators will share technology strategies and outputs, align conceptual understandings, and establish and draw from an international knowledge base. These collaborators, along with Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), will join iDigBio and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as they host Biodiversity 2020 in Washington, DC. Biodiversity 2020 will combine an international celebration of the worldwide progress made in biodiversity data accessibility in the 21st century with a biodiversity data conference that extends the life of Biodiversity Next. It will provide a venue for the GBIF governing board meeting, TDWG annual meeting, and the annual iDigBio Summit as well as three days of plenary and concurrent sessions focused on the present and future of biodiversity data generation, mobilization, and use.

scholarly journals The history and impact of digitization and digital data mobilization on biodiversity research

2018 ◽  
Vol 374 (1763) ◽  
pp. 20170391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Nelson ◽  
Shari Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
National Commission ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Biodiversity Research

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a rapid rise in the mobilization of digital biodiversity data. This has thrust natural history museums into the forefront of biodiversity research, underscoring their central role in the modern scientific enterprise. The advent of mobilization initiatives such as the United States National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC), Australia's Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Mexico's National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Brazil's Centro de Referência em Informação (CRIA) and China's National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) has led to a rapid rise in data aggregators and an exponential increase in digital data for scientific research and arguably provide the best evidence of where species live. The international Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) now serves about 131 million museum specimen records, and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) in the USA has amassed more than 115 million. These resources expose collections to a wider audience of researchers, provide the best biodiversity data in the modern era outside of nature itself and ensure the primacy of specimen-based research. Here, we provide a brief history of worldwide data mobilization, their impact on biodiversity research, challenges for ensuring data quality, their contribution to scientific publications and evidence of the rising profiles of natural history collections. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene’.

The Impact of Meteorology on Aircraft Operating Efficiency: Notes on a Discussion

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-132 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Working Group ◽  
Traffic Management ◽  
Time Slot ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Aviation ◽  
Operating Efficiency ◽  
Fuel Saving ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

A symposium was held in London on 6 December 1982 under aegis of the Institute with the traffic management fuel conservation working group to discuss meteorological forecasting and its application in terms of fuel saving. The chairman was J. C. Morrall, Chief Scientist of the Civil Aviation working group. In the United States, the work of Dr R. Steinberg of NASA on the penalties of imperfect forecasts and possible benefits from an improvement was of considerable interest. V. W. Attwooll and L. Bennett of the CAA had also studied penalties from North Atlantic forecasts. Part of the UK civil avionics programme was concerned with the forecast of winds applied in particular to 4-D time-slot following; this was. described by R. C. Rawlings of RAE Bedford. Mr C. Flood, of the Meteorological Office, finally presented prospects for improved forecasts.

scholarly journals Engaging K-12 Audiences with Biodiversity Data through Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26473
Author(s):  
Molly Phillips ◽  
Anne Basham ◽  
Marc Cubeta ◽  
Kari Harris ◽  
Jonathan Hendricks ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Science Standards ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
K 12

Natural history collections around the world are currently being digitized with the resulting data and associated media now shared online in aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio). These collections and their resources are accessible and discoverable through online portals to not only researchers and collections professionals, but to educators, students, and other potential downstream users. Primary and secondary education (K-12) in the United States is going through its own revolution with many states adopting Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS https://www.nextgenscience.org/). The new standards emphasize science practices for analyzing and interpreting data and connect to cross-cutting concepts such as cause and effect and patterns. NGSS and natural history collections data portals seem to complement each other. Nevertheless, many educators and students are unaware of the digital resources available or are overwhelmed with working in aggregated databases created by scientists. To better address this challenge, participants within the National Science Foundation Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections program (ADBC) have been working to increase awareness of, and scaffold learning for, digitized collections with K-12 educators and learners. They are accomplishing this through individual programs at institutions across the country as part of the Thematic Collections Networks and collaboratively through the iDigBio Education and Outreach Working Group. ADBC partners have focused on incorporating digital data and resources into K-12 classrooms through training workshops and webinars for both educators and collections professionals, as well as through creating educational resources, websites, and applications that use digital collections data. This presentation includes lessons learned from engaging K-12 audiences with digital data, summarizes available resources for both educators and collections professionals, shares how to become involved, and provides ways to facilitate transfer of educational resources to the K-12 community.

scholarly journals 2437

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (S1) ◽  
pp. 28-28
Author(s):  
Deepthi S. Varma ◽  
Jasmine Mack ◽  
Linda Cottler
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Drug Use ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Medical Services ◽  
Grocery Stores ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Impact

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Depression is one of the leading causes of diseases and disability among women of all ages in the United States. Lack of resources to meet one’s daily needs, access to health care, job opportunities, and drug use significantly contribute to depression among women. This paper aimed to explore the determinants of depression among women from a large community-based sample. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: HealthStreet is a community engagement research initiative at the University of Florida that utilizes the community health worker (CHW) model to assess health concerns and conditions of community members and link them to available social and medical services and health research. From October 2011 through December 2016, CHWs assessed 8469 community members from various locations in the community such as grocery stores, bus stops, health fairs, laundromats, and others. Among these 8469 participants contacted and assessed by the CHWs, 4952 (58.5%) were women. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Of the total 8469 participants, 4952 were women and 1839 (37.1%) reported ever having depression. Mean age of women who reported depression was 44.1 years (SD±14.4). Women who were current users of 3 or more drugs were 10 times more likely (95% CI: 5.73, 18.40; OR 10.27) to report depression compared with those who did not currently use any drugs. Those who were food insecure in the past 12 months (95% CI: 1.970, 2.576; OR 2.253) were twice more likely to report depression, while never married (95% CI: 0.576, 0.771; OR 0.666), and currently unemployed (95% CI: 0.535, 0.715; OR 0.619) women were less likely to report depression. Chronic health conditions such as hypertension (41.6% vs. 33.7%), diabetes (14% vs. 10.5%), and cancer (12.1% vs. 8.3%), and comorbid psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety (54.2% vs. 10.8%) and bipolar disorder (23.8% vs. 2.8%) were significantly higher (p<0.001) among women with depression compared with their counterparts. Significantly more women without a history of depression had medical insurance (68.8% vs. 64.3%) as compared with women with depression. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Depression was associated with food insecurity and drug use. The impact of drug use continues to be a major mental health concern among community-based women. Further, these findings emphasize the importance of community engagement programs such as HealthStreet, which utilizes the CHWs’ model to link community members to social and medical services within the community, in improving the mental health of women.

scholarly journals Institutional Differences in the Stewardship and Research Output of United States Herbaria

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Garretson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Research Output ◽  
Private Universities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Land ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Institution Type ◽  
Cultural Sector ◽  
The Impact

Public policy decisions regarding institutional frameworks that govern the stewardship of biodiversity data at public and private institutions are an area of increasing importance. Museums, government agencies, and academic institutions across the United States maintain collections of biological specimens and information critical to scientific discovery. One subset of these natural history collections are herbaria, or collections of preserved plant matter and their associated data. In this study, I evaluate the current state of the digitization and databasing of herbariums contributing data to the SEInet Regional Network of North American Herbaria, and assess the impact of characteristics, particularly institution type (cultural sector institutions, public universities, private universities, or public land institutions), on the metrics of herbaria richness, digitization, and research usage. The results of this study suggest that institution type is significantly associated with the size, diversity, and digitization efforts of a herbarium collection. Specifically, cultural sector institutions tend to have larger and more diverse collections, followed by public and private universities, and finally public land institutions. Additionally, as herbarium size and richness increases, the research output of associated staff also increases. These results highlight that some institutions, particularly larger institutions located at universities or cultural sector institutions, may be better supported in the curation, stewardship, and digitization of large collections, allowing long-term access to the associated biodiversity data. Smaller institutions at public land institutions may need additional support in these endeavors, and may represent an area of unmet needs for digitization and curatorial funding and resources.

Digital Resources: Digital Mesoamerica

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Wood
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Digital Resources ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Internet Archive ◽  
External Threats ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

Mesoamerica is a culture zone that stretches geographically from approximately north-central Mexico into the northwestern half of Central America. Human occupation of this region dates back thousands of years. The end of the Post-Classic Period (c. 1519) is marked by the invasion of the region by Europeans, who were looking to extract goods, services, and taxes from the Mesoamerican peoples. Spanish occupation stretched into the early 19th century. Neocolonial Mesoamerica, of the 19th and 20th centuries, came to experience increasing influences from the United States, Britain, Germany, and other external powers. The past two centuries have also been marked by a continuing local control by a minority, Euro-originating elite over a majority, indigenous population, even as what we once knew as Mesoamerica faded from view. The division between these ethnicities has grown somewhat less clear as a result of the increasing mixed-heritage mestizo or ladino population across the region. Authoritarian regimes marked much of the 20th century, and civilian rule (still without much or any indigenous participation) came at the end of that century, continuing up to the present. But police and military authorities remain present, concerned with internal dissent and unrest at least as much as external threats. For the present purposes, Digital Mesoamerica has as its focus the region’s indigenous cultures and their histories. Shared cultural traits in the pre-contact era—such as the calendars, glyphic writing, the ball court, human sacrifice, certain legends and religious beliefs, agricultural methods, art, and technologies—set off the many peoples of Mesoamerica from other parts of the Americas. The history of the culture zone is rich for exploring the rise of civilizations, social, economic, and political systems, gender ideologies and practices, religions, land tenure and agricultural systems, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, calendrics, and language diversity (among many other themes). Colonization and its dimensions—such as the impact of epidemic disease, the nature of hybrid religions, evolving tribute and labor systems, struggles over land, efforts to defend some measure of local autonomy, and more—is another arena of great scholarly interest. Contemporary studies are marked by human rights and cultural survival issues, ethnography, mining and other environmental crises, and fair trade, among many other topics. The most popular and numerous digital resources supporting research and teaching related to Mesoamerican cultures and their histories tend to center on indigenous-authored manuscripts and maps, some of them pre-contact and most of them colonial. These sources are located primarily in Mexican, Guatemalan, U.S., and European repositories, where institutional funds are supporting the creation of open-access digital collections of such materials, along with audio demonstrating language use, videos of all kinds, educational units, and photographs of three-dimensional cultural heritage materials. We are also witnessing moves toward the aggregation of digital content across multiple repositories, such as we see with the World Digital Library, the Internet Archive, and the Getty Research Portal, among others, which increasingly represent Mesoamerica along with other regions of the world. Individuals are also submitting their full-text publications to such aggregators as Academia.edu, announcing their public talks and publications on listservs, Twitter, and Facebook pages, or creating their own robust, one-of-a-kind Web-based projects (with funding from host institutions or national endowments).

scholarly journals Latin American Plea for Incorporation of Other, Non-English Languages in TDWG Standards Documentation

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Zermoglio ◽  
Anabela Plos ◽  
Néstor Acosta ◽  
Leisy Amaya ◽  
Dairo Escobar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Sharing ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Latin American Region ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Historically, some of the most successful biodiversity data sharing initiatives have been developed particularly in North America, Europe, and Australia. In parallel, and driven by necessity, tools, practices and standards were shared across othes communities. In the last decade, great efforts have been made by countries in other regions to join the biodiversity data network and share their data worldwide. Although knowledge, tools, and documentation are broadly distributed, language is the main constraint for their use, as most of it is only available in English. English may be the first most spoken language worldwide (Eberhard et al. 2020), but it is not native to most of the population, including a sizable proportion of the United States (Ryan 2013). For instance, Spanish is listed as the second most spoken native language worldwide, after Mandarin Chinese (Eberhard et al. 2020). While recognizing that English is currently considered the “universal language” for scientifically-related activities, it has been pointed out that a large proportion of biodiversity scientific knowledge is not produced in English, and that language constitutes a barrier to sharing knowledge (Amano et al. 2016). Actions to overcome this have been called for, for example by the 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) in its list of ambitions for supporting international collaboration (Hobern et al. 2019), but are still largely missing in the broad community. Language affects the understanding and use of biodiversity data standards and related documentation for all the community, both English and non-English speakers. Our findings in the Latin American region suggest that the availability of materials in other languages, namely Spanish and Portuguese, would greatly benefit the region and improve our involvement in biodiversity data sharing. Also, on the other hand, the English speaking community would benefit from better understanding knowledge in other non-English languages, allowing broader use of data from all regions. This work also constitutes a plea from the Latin American and the Spanish-speaking community at large to the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) to explore and incorporate other languages, hence fostering understanding, and therefore widening the use of TDWG standards in our region. We provide a list of people supporting the petition as Supplementary Material (Suppl. material 1). In the petition we also identify people (more than 60% of the signatories) who are willing to contribute to translating TDWG resources into Spanish. There is no single, best mechanism to move this initiative forward, but the approaches of some other initiatives (e.g., the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) translators network) are being explored, weighing resources needed both from the volunteers and the management perspectives. We will present the different options for the community to evaluate and decide upon a suitable action plan.

Demonstrating Nutrient Cost Gradients: A Brooklyn Case Study

2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 244-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Karp ◽  
Gary Wong ◽  
Marguerite Orsi
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Energy Content ◽  
Food Selection ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Department ◽  
Micronutrient Deficiencies ◽  
Caloric Density ◽  
Low Income Families ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. Introduction: Foods dense in micronutrients are generally more expensive than those with higher energy content. These cost-differentials may put low-income families at risk of diminished micronutrient intake. Objectives: We sought to determine differences in the cost for iron, folate, and choline in foods available for purchase in a low-income community when assessed for energy content and serving size. Methods: Sixty-nine foods listed in the menu plans provided by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for low-income families were considered, in 10 domains. The cost and micronutrient content for-energy and per-serving of these foods were determined for the three micronutrients. Exact Kruskal-Wallis tests were used for comparisons of energy costs; Spearman rho tests for comparisons of micronutrient content. Ninety families were interviewed in a pediatric clinic to assess the impact of food cost on food selection. Results: Significant differences between domains were shown for energy density with both cost-for-energy (p < 0.001) and cost-per-serving (p < 0.05) comparisons. All three micronutrient contents were significantly correlated with cost-for-energy (p < 0.01). Both iron and choline contents were significantly correlated with cost-per-serving (p < 0.05). Of the 90 families, 38 (42 %) worried about food costs; 40 (44 %) had chosen foods of high caloric density in response to that fear, and 29 of 40 families experiencing both worry and making such food selection. Conclusion: Adjustments to USDA meal plans using cost-for-energy analysis showed differentials for both energy and micronutrients. These differentials were reduced using cost-per-serving analysis, but were not eliminated. A substantial proportion of low-income families are vulnerable to micronutrient deficiencies.

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